What was claimed
A video shows a building on a corner in Morocco collapsing after the recent earthquake.
Our verdict
The video shows a building collapsing in Casablanca in December 2022.
Video of corner building collapsing was not taken in Morocco earthquake aftermath
19 September 2023
A video on Facebook of a building collapsing has the caption: “The moment a house collapsed in Al-Bayda as a result of the #earthquake. #Marocco [sic]”. The video was posted on 9 September 2023.
However, the video actually shows a building collapsing in Casablanca (known in Arabic as Al-Dar al-Bayda) in December 2022. Footage of the collapse has been circulating online since 26 December.
Local news outlets reported that no one was hurt in the accident, which they say occurred on the night of 26/27 December. They did not mention an earthquake being the cause.
We’ve previously checked a very similar video of a building collapsing in Casablanca in 2020, which some people also claimed showed the aftermath of the 8 September earthquake in Morocco, a disaster that has killed at least 2,901 people and injured over 5,000.
Major news stories like this one can quickly become the subject of misinformation online, with misattributed images and videos being difficult to correct after they are shared widely. We’ve seen this happen previously with the Maui fires, the riots in France and February’s earthquake in Turkey and Syria.
Misinformation like this can be hard to spot, so it’s worth checking if social media images and videos are what they say they are before you share. We’ve written a guide on how to verify videos here.
Image courtesy of T’Amal
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the video shows a building collapsing in Casablanca last year.